This video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Fantasy premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings).

Fantasy presents four artists—Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen—whose hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime works transport us to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness.

Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania; he lives and works in New York. Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects. The subject of art history is a constant undercurrent, whether Koons elevates kitsch to the level of Classical art, produces photos in the manner of Baroque paintings, or develops public works that borrow techniques and elements of seventeenth-century French garden design. Organizing his own studio production in a manner that rivals a Renaissance workshop, Koons makes computer-assisted, handcrafted works that communicate through their meticulous attention to detail.